I am trying to export a mesh from some scientific experiment (in MATLAB) and load it in blender for rendering. I'd like to assign per-face colors (as opposed to per-vertex with interpolation over faces), and am willing to use any suggested solution (i.e., any file format, some trick with UV coordinates etc.).
What is the simplest way to go with this?
Short answer:
.x3d, an xml based format. Color can be either specified
When imported via Blender's importer either method get converted to a per vertex per face scheme for the vertex_color layer.
Stanford .PLY format. (vertex colours are shared over all faces that use the vertex, only way to get color-per-face with this format is wasteful duplication of each vertex)
or
homegrown code: essentially this code. all you need to write is the part where you map the current polygon.index to a color, so all vertices of that loop are assigned the same colour.
Take a cube.
import bpy indexed_colors = [ (1,0,0), (1,1,0), (1,0,1), (0,0,1), (0,1,1), (0,1,0)] obj = bpy.data.objects['Cube'] mesh = obj.data # you probably know how to create the color layer.. if not mesh.vertex_colors: # creates one 'Col' by default obj.data.vertex_colors.new() color_layer = mesh.vertex_colors['Col'] i = 0 for poly in mesh.polygons: # print(poly.loop_indices) color = indexed_colors[poly.index] for idx in poly.loop_indices: # loop = mesh.loops[idx] # v = loop.vertex_index color_layer.data[i].color = color[:3] i +=1 
More elaboration on mesh generation is here: How to create a mesh programmatically, without bmesh?
mesh = bpy.data.meshes.new("mesh_name") mesh.from_pydata(vertices=[], edges=[], faces=[]) mesh.update() obj = bpy.data.objects.new("obj_name", mesh) scene = bpy.context.scene scene.objects.link(obj) For both methods you still need to configure the Object's material once imported, if you want it to show the vertex_color layer. This configuration is relatively painless but slightly different depending on which render engine you intend to use.
For Cycles you use a node based material, shown here
For Blender's Internal renderer the process is covered here
only way to get color-per-face with this format is wasteful duplication of each vertex: this is not true, actually. You can add something like that in the header: element face #### property uchar red property uchar green property uchar blue property list uchar int vertex_index (sorry for the line breaks), this actually works in software such as Meshlab. $\endgroup$ X3D is interesting indeed. You can subsequently edit the scale of the object in meshlab and use mesh warp algorithms based on xyz in meshlab. it saves x3d per vertex ok if you uncheck normal in the save options.
here is example of simplest x3d per face if you write a parser, i did and it works fine.
[code]
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE X3D PUBLIC "http://www.web3d.org/specifications/x3d-3.3.dtd" ""> <X3D> <Scene> <Shape> <IndexedFaceSet colorPerVertex='false' colorIndex='1 0 2 3 4 4' coordIndex='0 1 2 3 -1 7 6 5 4 -1 0 3 7 4 -1 0 4 5 1 -1 1 5 6 2 -1 2 6 7 3'> <Coordinate point=' -0.095 -0.115 0.04 0.095 -0.115 0.04 0.095 0.115 0.04 -0.095 0.115 0.04 -0.095 -0.115 0.00 0.095 -0.115 0.00 0.095 0.115 0.00 -0.095 0.115 0.00'/> <Color color=' 0.999 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.94 0.0 0.04 0.095 0.9115 0.095 -0.85 0.00 0.04 0.095 0.00115 '/> </IndexedFaceSet> </Shape> </Scene> </X3D> [/code]
